:::On the other hand, even though the English backtransclusions of [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Move&hidelinks=1&hideredirs=1 Template:Move] are only very few, we did lose track of the only article flagged to be moved back to its author's page, [[Bottle]], so you may have a point there. I've just moved that article though, so coming back to my previous argument, a hypothetical new template would now be left unused.

:::On the other hand, even though the English backtransclusions of [https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:Move&hidelinks=1&hideredirs=1 Template:Move] are only very few, we did lose track of the only article flagged to be moved back to its author's page, [[Bottle]], so you may have a point there. I've just moved that article though, so coming back to my previous argument, a hypothetical new template would now be left unused.

::::Actually scratch my previous reply. The fundamental question is if we want non-Arch related content on the ArchWiki. For example [[Haiku]] or [[Resolv.conf#Alternative DNS servers]] have nothing to do with Arch Linux. [[Template:Out of scope]] would help reduce scope creep.--[[User:Larivact|Larivact]] ([[User talk:Larivact|talk]]) 14:36, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

::::Maybe we could put the following table into [[ArchWiki:Statistics#Maintenance statistics]] to help with the tracking problem? Note that the <nowiki>{{PAGESINCATEGORY}}</nowiki> values are cached and change only when the page is purged or edited, but [[ArchWiki:Statistics]] is updated frequently anyway. -- [[User:Lahwaacz|Lahwaacz]] ([[User talk:Lahwaacz|talk]]) 17:14, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

::::Maybe we could put the following table into [[ArchWiki:Statistics#Maintenance statistics]] to help with the tracking problem? Note that the <nowiki>{{PAGESINCATEGORY}}</nowiki> values are cached and change only when the page is purged or edited, but [[ArchWiki:Statistics]] is updated frequently anyway. -- [[User:Lahwaacz|Lahwaacz]] ([[User talk:Lahwaacz|talk]]) 17:14, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

::::Actually scratch my previous reply. The fundamental question is if we want non-Arch related content on the ArchWiki. For example [[Haiku]] or [[Resolv.conf#Alternative DNS servers]] have nothing to do with Arch Linux. [[Template:Out of scope]] would help reduce scope creep.--[[User:Larivact|Larivact]] ([[User talk:Larivact|talk]]) 14:36, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

+

+

:::::Trying to address such an issue systematically might be opening a big can of worms, we'd really need to first define unambiguously and objectively what "Arch-related" means for us. Arch Linux is just a ''software distribution'' after all, third-party that is, nothing more (well, plus all the community services), even articles like [[systemd]] could be affected depending on the definition. I don't have anything to propose at the moment, but if you want to give it a go it will be interesting to review it. -- [[User:Kynikos|Kynikos]] ([[User talk:Kynikos|talk]]) 11:02, 5 May 2018 (UTC)

Grouped Notes/Warnings/Tips and numbered parameter

According to Help:Style#Notes.2C_Warnings.2C_Tips, we should use unnumbered list to group successive Notes/Warnings/Tips into a single template. However, this can't be (easily) done when it's necessary to use numbered parameter, e.g. when some note contains URL with "=" symbol. See:

However I don't think we should recommend it (too hacky), maybe this is one of the cases where the "recommended only when the solutions above are not practicable" note in Help:Template#HTML entities can be rightfully applied. Other ideas? Avoid recommending to merge stacked note templates? The problem would persist in note templates that have to start with a list anyway...

I admit that localized "administrative templates" can be useful for coordinating the effort of a translation team, and having English messages on localized pages might be considered ugly, but there are considerable downsides in splitting the Special:WhatLinksHere by language this way.

Another step deeper, maybe we should put together a list of templates that should not be translated?

I think what you're saying makes sense (and a lot) only for Template:Deletion; the admins (like any other user) can't expand, merge or update articles written in languages they don't speak, right? :) What other templates were you thinking about? -- Kynikos (talk) 10:43, 11 September 2014 (UTC)

True, every other article status template could be used in localized form by the maintenance team. Regardless, there will always be fragmentation of the Special:WhatLinksHere: for example when fulfilling the requests, it is common to use English message (and template) on localized pages if the editor does not speak the language. This should be definitely considered by the translation teams.

Personally, I find it strange that outdated or inaccurate content from English pages can be spread by translation (see [1]).

About the first point on "fragmentation" of WLH pages, do you mean that it inevitably happens that some localized articles are marked with localized templates and some with English templates? In what cases is it possible that somebody adds a status template to an article without being able to understand its language? And if (s)he does, is that really the right thing to do? And if it is, maybe we could recommend to use the localized version of the template even if the message is then written in English?

About the second point on template "spreading", I don't find it "strange" if it happens when somebody translates from an article that is marked with such status template: he's adding the localized template not only to remind to the team that the article contains outdated content, but also to notify all non-contributing readers about possible inaccuracies. But maybe I haven't understood what you meant exactly?

Just to come back to the original topic, isn't it a good thing that the WLH pages for the English status templates are not (ideally) "polluted" by non-English articles? (Doesn't apply to Template:Deletion, I know)

For example when fulfilling ArchWiki:Requests, there is often some unique keyword or phrase to identify the relevant section, even in localized pages. Google translate can be used to partially understand the surrounding text, even if the translation is grammatically incorrect. This makes it pretty easy to mark the section with English message (translating the message from English would be risky, the grammar mistakes might alter the meaning), which I think is an improvement (any warning should be better than none). Using a localized template in this case would require checking if such template exists, and even if it does, combining localized template and English message is even more weird.

About fragmentation and using localized article status templates generally, its advantage is that it filters out other languages in the WLH lists, but this only partial (the global list will always contain some localized pages, unless we want to create the necessary templates for each language and do some mass cleanup, and the localized lists will not point out localized pages marked with global templates). The disadvantage is that global maintenance, if only marking as outdated as per ArchWiki:Requests, will be harder.

Ok, of course each solution has pros and cons (will we need a summary table for this issue too?): honestly I wouldn't find it too weird if a localized template had an English message, which could also be translated afterwards by somebody else. Yes, adding a localized status template requires a bit more typing, sometimes even copy-pasting if there are non-Latin chars in the language name: this could be mitigated in the future by Help talk:i18n#Language namespace(s) in place of suffixes?; I understand this could effectively discourage adding status templates to translations. On the other hand, a bot would be able to convert the templates to the proper localized versions very easily, so that's a task that could be performed periodically (it could be used to check also other templates). And yes, having a translated version for each template would be required if we enforced such a policy. Finally, let's not forget that localized templates would be more useful to casual readers than English templates.

About the template spreading, it is safe to assume that Template:Poor writing will never be translated. Instead, the translator will probably fix the English article prior to translating it, which is happening a lot, even when the style issues are not marked with a template, and this is absolutely great. On the other hand, I have never noticed any other article status template being resolved during translation. Admittedly, sometimes it is best to just translate the inaccurate content along with the template, or the translator might be unable to resolve it, but in terms of statistics I think that I should have noticed at least some effort by now.

Well, Template:Poor writing does have a translation already with some backtransclusions, I'm not sure if you'd delete it (I wouldn't). -- Kynikos (talk) 05:03, 14 September 2014 (UTC)

As the discussion about other article status templates is getting slightly off-topic, let's take a list of one item for now, Template:Deletion. How do we mark it as non-translatable? The translated versions could then be redirected to the English template and deleted when there are no backlinks. -- Lahwaacz (talk) 22:01, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

I think the EAFP approach is better in this case, I can think of 2 implementations:

Create a redirect for each Template:Deletion_(Language) title and protect them from editing with an exhaustive justification in the summary (this solution would A) be more consistent with the usage of the other status templates and B) allow us grouping the backtransclusions of Template:Deletion by language in its WLH page).

Redirect the existing translations temporarily, convert them all with a bot, then delete them and finally protect all the Template:Deletion_(Language) titles from creation with an exhaustive justification in the summary.

Template "nowrap"

Although there are already some alternative solutions available for specific cases (e.g. &nbsp; for non-breaking space, &#8209; for non-breaking hyphen), the "nowrap" template (and/or other similar templates) covers additional cases.

For example, you might find one line of text presented as ending with the word package and the same sentence continues in the next line, presented as starting with (s). By using the "nowrap" template on this expression, you get package(s) all together, either at the end of one line or at the beginning of the next one, but never separated in 2 lines.

This is just an example. Other cases can be (more) relevant (too). Obviously, the "nowrap" template can also be used instead of (multiple) non-breaking spaces and non-breaking hyphens.

Without a "nowrap" (or similar) template, the alternatives are either to not care about these things, or to use one of the following (please note that some alternatives might be more appropriate than others):

<span class="nowrap">This text will not wrap.</span>
Some sentence... <span class="nowrap">package(s)</span> and the sentence continues.

<span style="white-space:nowrap">This text will not wrap.</span>
Some sentence... <span style="white-space:nowrap">package(s)</span> and the sentence continues.

The "nowrap" template also has some "alias" (or redirection) names in Wikipedia, or we could use a new different name for this same template.

Is this kind of situation worth a template for the ArchLinux wiki? Any thoughts? Ady (talk) 15:39, 27 March 2016 (UTC)

I don't know, it seems a bit overcomplicated to me... What browser are you using that wraps "package(s)" at the parenthesis? At least Firefox correctly interprets it as a single word, since I do believe that these cases should be handled by the browser. The same goes for e.g. "package-s". Can you give more examples where this template would be needed (and would be a clearly better solution than using non-breaking spaces etc.)? — Kynikos (talk) 06:57, 30 March 2016 (UTC)

Hmm, perhaps I have not used the best example - I know I have seen this "package(s)" example somewhere, but currently I cannot recall where / when exactly.

I should point out that users could see an unwanted (word) wrapping, depending on the width of the wiki text area (e.g. screen resolution, web browser's zoom, fonts...).

BTW, using space characters and hyphens are the (most) common word-separators in certain languages, but not in all of them (e.g. CJK languages), so a "nowrap" template might be even more helpful in some translated wiki pages than in the English ones.

I want to be clear. I am also not completely sure this type of template is "essential" for the ArchLinux wiki. It is potentially helpful; the question would be whether it is worth it. Ady (talk) 02:51, 31 March 2016 (UTC)

I see, I should have been more specific, but what I meant with "more examples" is existing samples of the ArchWiki (in any language) where such template would improve the page rendering and/or the source text. To put it in other words: after creating the template, where exactly is it going to be used?

In general I'm against creating templates (or Categories, etc.) "just in case they come in handy one day", although in this case I admit the idea can make somewhat sense, so if you really feel you want to create the template, I won't object further, maybe somebody else will find good uses for it and we'll start appreciating its existence ^^

I am a contributor to other wiki sites (in addition to the ArchLinux wiki). As editor(s) of wiki text, it is usually recommended to be aware that readers might use very different setups. While I/we might not see a certain behavior in the presentation of the wiki text / page, others might.

Although the ArchLinux wiki would not (need to) consider older versions of web browsers (or web browsers being used in non-Linux OSes), I am used to test the results of my editions with at least a couple of different setups.

I found a web page about word wrapping in HTML that might be of interest to (some) wiki editors. Some notes about it:

Most of its content mentions Internet Explorer, but it also mentions Firefox, Opera and others.

In theory, it is somewhat outdated (at the time of this writing, its last update was during 2013).

In spite of its date, I am convinced that at least some of the issues are still relevant (with potential improvements and regressions in each new version / variant of web browser).

The part of that web page that is relevant to our discussion here is that there are several alternative methods so to achieve the desired wrapping result, whether it is about preventing word-wrapping, imposing word-wrapping, or allowing optional wrapping at certain specific positions within an expression / word.

Some of the simpler alternatives, (probably with a varying degree of effective results): &nbsp;, &#8209;, &#xfeff;, &#8288;, wbc, and for generic wiki text, a "nowrap" (or, one of its alias names, "nobr") templates.

The advantage of a "nowrap" template over its non-template alternatives is that it is more generic; editors can avoid having to use different tricks according to the specific character (space, hyphen, minus sign, em/en dash...) and it covers potential cases that have no alternative or that would make the source of the wiki text less-readable.

So, without a "nowrap" template, I guess that most of the relevant cases in Latin-like languages would be covered by some non-template alternative, or by using the full "span style expression". Although perhaps there might be some cases in which a "nowrap" template would not have an alternative in Latin-like languages, I am also guessing that such (few?) cases would probably not be worth a template in the ArchLinux wiki.

But then there are the CJK languages, in which wrapping styles / rules might be more important / complex than some form of "hyphen" and/or space characters.

Maybe User:Fengchao and/or other members that are fluent in CJK languages might have a different / relevant perspective?

That section doesn't actually even talk about external links, while Help:Editing#External links says "just type the full URL", but also that "it is often more useful to make the link display something other than the URL". --Dettalk 16:04, 24 July 2015 (UTC)

This was already mentioned somewhere some time ago, I don't remember where nor when, anyway [3] would seem to justify the creation of a Template:BBS, just like we have Template:Bug. — Kynikos (talk) 15:18, 25 July 2015 (UTC)

The problem with a BBS template is that links to the full thread have simple query string ?id=number, whereas links to posts have ?pid=number#number. There would have to be two different templates, which would get confusing very quickly.

There are more problems with existing links to the BBS: from looking at the list you posted, there are many links specifying the page number in the query string (p=num), but FluxBB has variable/configurable number of posts per page. The links should point to either the full thread (first page), or a specific post.

Like with links to bugs, a bbs url has to be pasted and manually modified anyway, but most of the times the conversion to Template:Bug ends up being done by a bot, which would be able to use two different BBS templates appropriately.

?id=number&p=number: when number is 1, they could drop it and use Template:BBSid; otherwise they should point to a post as you say and use a Template:BBSpid template (we could publish a list of such links for manual fixing, since the correct post has to be found by a human, a bot can't do it).

?pid=number: these could be changed to Template:BBSpid instances, the link fragment is the same as number with a prefixed p, so it's easy to add using the same template argument.

?pid=number#pnumber: these could be changed to Template:BBSpid instances, number needs to be specified only once.

?t=number: these seem to be all broken, so they should be marked as dead, or fixed.

3. and 4. are identical (btw. haven't you confused their descriptions a little?), except that 3. only opens the page with the given post (based on the user's posts-per-page setting), but stays at the top of the page, whereas 4. points directly to the post (the #pnumber is the trick to do it). So 3. should also never be used, but it's trivial to transform it to 4. -- Lahwaacz (talk) 09:50, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

Of course, I was reasoning from a bot's point of view, which would indeed see 3. and 4. as different cases. My description of 3. was assuming that the need for a fragment was obvious (hence the mention of how easy it is to add it even if it's not in the original link), but what's important is that you seem to have understood anyhow :P — Kynikos (talk) 10:44, 26 July 2015 (UTC)

I agree on using only PID and ID. If you're linking to a page, you most likely should link to a PID. To distinguish between both, you could use ## for PID and # for ID.

I don't have suggestions on automating the implementation. -- Alad (talk) 11:18, 23 October 2015 (UTC)

Escape template-breaking characters

I make changes to the body of the section. But I am not stupid to rename/move the section. That is why while people encounter escaping problems, they get a banner that transfer them to this section as usual. I tested that. I make rewrite of section, because I learn MediaWiki and Arch Wiki and I almost understand nothing from that article. Also escaping of '|' was surprisingly lacking, while I was transferring here. - PiroXiline (talk) 17:28, 9 September 2016 (UTC)

New Template Application

I was thinking a new template could be added for application pages that would give quick info on a package. It would be right floated like "related articles". I made a quick example here: User:Meskarune/package but it could use more work on the format/syntax. Meskarune (talk) 20:17, 23 January 2017 (UTC)

I don't see the point of this. You want to know the package name? Look in #Installation. The website and description? Should be linked in the intro. systemd service, user & group and man pages should be under #Usage. Config paths & examples under #Configuration. –Larivact (talk) 05:43, 2 January 2018 (UTC)

Creation of Template:Cat main

Lately I've seen you hardcode that, e.g. [4]. I don't really mind one way or the other, but as you say a Cat main template is a battle-tested feature of Wikipedia, so we might indeed use it here as well. -- Kynikos (talk) 17:07, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

The result would never be like the Wikipedia template because we don't have lua modules. There should also be more general discussion whether to start using hatnotes or not. There was some discussion in Template talk:Hatnote but that page's history is unfortunately lost. -- Lahwaacz (talk) 17:14, 14 April 2018 (UTC)

Creation of Template:Out of scope

We currently don't have a template to flag pages that are not relevant to Arch Linux. --Larivact (talk) 07:54, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

...but we have a procedure that involves existing templates; after all, if an article is deemed irrelevant we ultimately want to discuss an action to do on it, i.e. expand, update, fix, clean-up, merge, move, redirect or archive. Being irrelevant is the reason for flagging, for which all status templates have a dedicated parameter. -- Kynikos (talk) 15:42, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

I think the "move article back to the author's User page" action deserves its own template, so that such procedures can be tracked via Special:WhatLinksHere. --Larivact (talk) 16:07, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

I don't know, it doesn't feel like it happens often enough to justify a complication of our status-template system, although that's the only opposing argument that I can think of.

On the other hand, even though the English backtransclusions of Template:Move are only very few, we did lose track of the only article flagged to be moved back to its author's page, Bottle, so you may have a point there. I've just moved that article though, so coming back to my previous argument, a hypothetical new template would now be left unused.

Trying to address such an issue systematically might be opening a big can of worms, we'd really need to first define unambiguously and objectively what "Arch-related" means for us. Arch Linux is just a software distribution after all, third-party that is, nothing more (well, plus all the community services), even articles like systemd could be affected depending on the definition. I don't have anything to propose at the moment, but if you want to give it a go it will be interesting to review it. -- Kynikos (talk) 11:02, 5 May 2018 (UTC)